1880 's Some Ancient Greek Portraits 1889 Original magazine article.Removed from an antique magazine. Quite Scarce.
6 pages with 10 illustrations.
Please take a look at the article's sample page(s).
seen them, and the accompanying illus- trations will doubtless corroborate this view. The pictures are, to be sure, of varying merit, but the first impression which the spectator receives is one of closeacciiracy. The various hues are well giv~n, from fairness through and be- y6nd~the different shades of the brunette to a very full admixture of African blood. The different degrees of skill seem ,at first to establish a wide differ- ence of date, for it is easy, too easy, to conjecture that the crude pictures were painted a century or so before the good ones, but, since similar inequalities may be found in every modern picture ex- hibition, it is fairer to conjecture that then, as in more recent days, some pre- ferred, from motives of economy or from lack of taste, incompetent artists, while others made a wiser choice. Even more weighty arguments leave the determination of the exact date of the portraits somewhat vague. They must have been painted before 395 A.D., when the edict of Theodosius forbade heathen funeral rites, and~ Professor Ebers is inclined to~ believe that some were painted possibly three or four centu~ ries before the Christian era, and others probably in the first two centuries after Number 43. Christ. This would bring them into the flowering time of Alexandrine art, when the Antinotts,f6r example, ~vas produced, in the reign of Hadrian, 117138 A.D. The best of the portraits certainly do not contradict the hypothesis that they belong to a period of brilliant art work. The quality that most distinguishes them is a directness, a simplicity, which is most attractive. There is, perhaps, a certain conventionality in the treatment of the eyes, which have a somewhat mo- notonous stare, but, with that exception the portraits are above all things nat- ural and evidently life-like. In all of them the person is painted quite, or very nearly in full face, and the shoul- ders form the lower limit of the picture. They are generally painted in encaustic, that is to say, in a mixture of pure wax and a liquid balsam, into which were Number 16
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Fayoum women on wooden panel " Fayoum Portraits" 2000 years ago.
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